108 Y oussou N'Dour, in Senegal, would get rich from music. She did not be- lieve that one day they were going to be big men at home. It may be that her hard African life had cheated her of Ie black feeling. She did not really under- stand why Frankie-she called him Bernardin, which was his Christian name, after St. Bernard-wanted to dress up when he went to the club to play, or why he talked about having a feeling that was special, a feeling that seemed to contradict the poverty around him. There is a song going around Paris now-an I voirien who goes by the name Cophie wrote it- about a man with a new universe in his head, a universe where there is no drought or famine or despair, no war or animosity, only brothers and sisters with plenty to eat, and rain for bath- ing. The man with a new universe in his head makes an appointment to see the important men who are in the busi- ness of building new universes, but he knows that he must not arrive at his meeting on foot, looking like a poor African. He has to arrive in a long Rolls- Royce, looking like the sort of man who can make a new universe pay. He has to inspire confidence, and there is no way he can inspire confi- dence. He cannot afford a long Rolls- Royce-not even for the afternoon. He has to walk to his meeting, and the important businessmen laugh when they see him, and say "Who is this poor African who wants us to build a new universe?" and they send him away. One of the Ghetto Blasters says that Frankie, talking in his soft, insis- tent voice about mango priests and old shoes and dancing popes and brothers and sisters, is really looking for a new universe. "Let me tell you," Frankie says, "I needed shoes." Frankie left Cameroon on Septem- ber 21, 1975. He is often vague on dates, but September 21 st is one date he remembers. That morning, Frankie crossed the border into Nige- ria in the company of three other mu- sicians and a Nigerian "manager," who had invited them to play in his fine new club in a city called Aba. That afternoon, Frankie discovered that the fine new club was a pile of sticks and cinder blocks waiting for him and his friends to put it up. He had what amounted to four dollars in his pocket. It got him to Onitsha, the market town of the old Biafran state and the headquarters of the Fifth Bri- gade of the Nigerian Army, and that night in Onitsha he met a bass guitarist from Cameroon named Willy N'For, who played in the brigade band-it was called The Pentagon- and whom Frankie knew at once for a true brother. Willy came from a mis- sion, too-only his missionaries were evangelicals from New Jersey. They ran a school called the World-WIde Missions School, in Muyuka, and they were not notably disposed toward any music except hymns. The car at the W orld- Wide Missions School was used for collecting Willy and his friends when they sneaked away at night and booked themselves into the local clubs as a teen-age rock group called the Gentles. Willy knew how to play the box guitar and the trumpet- his father was a policeman and a fine trumpet player, Willy says-but once when the Gentles decided to give a real concert he rented a six-string acoustic guitar and started improvising bass chords, and after that he figured he had found his instrument. He had time to reflect, because the principal of the W orld- Wide Missions School sus- pended him for his playing and put him to work clearing bush for a gar- den. He spent two weeks in the bush and thought about music. "I thought about Fela and Manu, about the Afri- can musicians I was hearing," he told Frankie. "I thought, Wow, so Afri- cans can play like that! I never knew how rich African music was-how jazzy, how African. I thought, I'd better do music." There was a party that night at Willy's. It began at ten and went on until morning, and by the time Frankie recovered, his new brother had persuaded the lieutenant who ran The Pentagon that what the band needed was a keyboard man with three chords and a repertoire of American funk and the lyrics of the Temptations in his head There were not many civilians in The Pentagon. For a MAY 19, 1986 while, all that Frankie and Willy had to do was sleep all day and celebrate all night and occasionally join the band for a concert in the officers' mess, but Frankie and Willy played so well to- gether that the lieutenant decided there was money in The Pentagon for him. It does not seem to have occurred to the lieutenant that six years after a civil war in which at least a million Biafrans died people in Onitsha would be disinclined to make merry to the music of the Nigerian Army. He started booking The Pentagon into Onitsha night clubs, where they played either to empty rooms or to murderous audiences. It was not a good feeling, Frankie says. He and Willy and their civilian friends had to "resign" from the band by flashlight at four one morning while the lieutenant was distracted. (The lieutenant was distracted because his commander had just been taken away and shot as a conspirator in an attempted coup d'état.) They made it to the town of Port Harcourt. There were six of them-enough for a group-and so they introduced themselves around as the Mighty Flames and went looking for a manager to buy them instru- ments. W HEN Frankie came to Paris as a Ghetto Blaster, the first thing he wanted to know was who would own the instruments he was going to play. It was the first thing Willy wanted to know when he joined Ghetto Blaster, and the first thing P. P. P. Kiala Nzavotunga, the lead guitarist, wanted to know, too. There are eight musicians in Ghetto Blaster, and half of them-all but the two sax- ophonists, the drummer, and the per- cussionist-depend on complicated elec- tronic equipment that costs a fortune. The percussionist, U doh Essiet, plays with a pair of short wooden sticks and two simple congas that were made for him in Nigeria, and, according to Wil- ly, who has a gift for description, he is "the pure real shock of Africa" at the heart of Ghetto Blaster's jazzy, eclec- tic sound, the way the saxophonists are "the color that arranges it." Willy himself plays a Yamaha BB800 bass guitar and a Lag Black Bass hooked up to a Peavey Combo amplifier, and Frankie uses a big Roland JX-8P syn- thesizer and a DX7 Yamaha synthe- sizer, and sometimes, in concert, he adds a Korg Remote keyboard for wandering around the stage and danc- ing. If you asked either of them the main difference between playing with